Toward a Polylogical Philology of the Literatures of the World

Ottmar Ette is professor of Romance literatures at the University of Potsdam. His most recent works include Anton Wilhelm Amo: Philosophieren ohne festen Wohnsitz; Eine Philosophie der Aufklärung zwischen Europa und Afrika (2014) and Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures without a Fixed Abode, edited and translated by Vera M. Kutzinski (2016).

Abstract

As the world cannot be adequately understood from the vantage point of a single language, the literatures of the world can no longer be trimmed to a single world literature in the Goethean sense. This recognition bodes well for the future of philology and of literary production. Through multiperspectival writing, knowledge of life may be attainable without being reduced to a single political, medial, cartographical, geocultural, or aesthetic logic. As a laboratory for polylogical thinking, literature does not represent reality, as Erich Auerbach put it. Rather, it represents multiple lived, experienced, or relivable realities. Whoever is open to a polylogical reception of the literatures of the world can perceive and experience how life knowledge transforms into lived knowledge and how knowledge for survival turns into knowledge for living together. However, literature can be more than it is only if it stays aware of the void, of lack, of privation, of the interminable: aware of the end that never is an end. Such a planetary concept of the literatures of the world offers valuable opportunities to all those who do not fall into the trap of contenting themselves with a supposed abundance of text.